Ship History

The greatest escape story of Australian colonial history by the son of Australia's best-loved storyteller. In 1823, cockney sailor and chancer James Porter was convicted of stealing a stack of beaver furs and transported halfway around the world to Van Diemen's Land, before being sent to Sarah Island. Many had tried to escape Sarah Island; few had succeeded. But when Governor George Arthur announced that the place would be closed and its prisoners moved to the new penal station of Port Arthur, Porter, along with a motley crew of other prisoners, pulled off an audacious escape.

The riveting story of one of the most calamitous voyages in Australian history, the plague-stricken sailing ship Ticonderoga that left England for Victoria with 800 doomed emigrants on board. For more than a century and a half, a grim tale has passed down through Michael Veitch’s family: the story of the Ticonderoga, a clipper ship that sailed from Liverpool in August 1852, crammed with poor but hopeful emigrants - mostly Scottish victims of the Clearances and the potato famine. A better life, they believed, awaited them in Australia.

Based on a real-life event, an epic historical novel from the award-winning author of Things in Jars, The Night Ship illuminates the lives of two characters: a girl shipwrecked on an island off Western Australia and, 300 years later, a boy finding a home with his grandfather on the very same island.

Normal Women is a radical retelling of our nation’s story – not of the rise and fall of kings and the occasional queen – but of social and cultural change, powered by the determination, persistence and effectiveness of women – from 1066 to modern times. Did women really do nothing to shape England’s culture and traditions in nine centuries of turmoil, plague, famine, religious reform and the rise of empire and industry?

In 1872, the Mary Celeste merchant ship set sail from New York, bound for Italy. About a month later, it was spotted adrift in the ocean. The crew had vanished. The ship’s charts were found scattered, and crew members’ belongings were still onboard. The lifeboat was missing.

From a Bronze Age ship built during the age of Queen Nefertiti, a Viking warship made for King Cnut himself, Henry VIII's spectacular Mary Rose and the golden age of the Tudor court, to the exploration of the Arctic, the tragic story of HMS Terror and tales of bravery and endurance aboard HMS Gairsoppa in World War Two, these are the stories of some of the greatest underwater discoveries of all time. A rich and exciting narrative, this is not just the story of those ships and the people who sailed on them, the cargo and treasure they carried and their tragic fate.

The great city of Troy is under siege as Greek heroes Achilles and Agamemnon wage bloody war over a stolen woman. In the Greek camp, another woman is watching and waiting: Briseis. She was a queen of this land until Achilles sacked her city and murdered her husband and sons. Now she is Achilles' concubine: a prize of battle. Briseis is just one among thousands of women backstage in this war - the slaves and prostitutes, the nurses, the women who lay out the dead - all of them voiceless in history.

By 1120, Henry was perhaps the most formidable ruler in Europe, with an enviable record on the battlefield, immense lands and wealth and unprecedented authority in his kingdoms. Everything he had worked so hard for was finally achieved, and he was ready to hand it on to his beloved son and heir, William Ætheling. Henry I and his retinue set out first. The White Ship - considered the fastest afloat - would follow, carrying the young prince. Spoilt and arrogant, William had plied his comrades and crew with drink from the minute he stepped aboard....

The sinking of the submarine S-51 was one of the greatest tragedies in American naval history. Due to a miscommunication and subsequent collision between the sub and a passing steamship on a September night, the S-51, including 33 of its crew of 36, sank to the ocean depths. The tragedy of the S-51 captivated the nation, and was a fixture in the pages of American newspapers. The story took on a whole new dimension when the navy decided to take over the salvage of the 1,000-ton behemoth from a civilian company.

This introduction to the years of the Napoleonic Wars (1793 to 1815) tells the story of one of the keys to that great conflict, the ship of the line - the deadly battleships that played such a vital role in the battles. The author describes the ships' construction and armaments, the daily life of the men who served, and the problems faced by commanders of the time in battles that include the Glorious First of June, the Battle of the Nile and Trafalgar.

In his major new work, Michael Palin - former Monty Python stalwart and much-loved television globe-trotter - brings to life the world and voyages of HMS Erebus, from its construction in the naval dockyards of Pembroke, to the part it played in Ross’s Antarctic expedition of 1839-43, to its abandonment during Franklin’s ill-fated Arctic expedition, and to its final rediscovery on the seabed in Queen Maud Gulf in 2014.

On the night of 14/15 April 1912, a supposedly unsinkable ship, the largest and most luxurious vessel in the world at the time, collided with an iceberg and sank on her maiden voyage. Of the 2,208 people on board, only 712 were saved. The rest either drowned or froze to death. How could this 'unsinkable' vessel sink and why did so few of those aboard survive? The authors bring the tragedy to life, telling the story of the ship's design, construction, and maiden voyage.

Sailing across the Pacific, the battle-scarred heavy cruiser USS Indianapolis had just delivered a secret cargo that would trigger the end of World War II. Heading westward, she was sunk by a Japanese submarine. In 12 minutes, some 300 men went down with her. More than 900 other spent four horrific days and five nights in the ocean with no water to drink, savaged by a pitiless sun and swarms of sharks. Incredibly, no one knew they were there until a navy patrol plane accidentally discovered them. In the end, only 316 crewmen survived. How could this have happened - and why?

Between 1995 and 2007, the Republic of Ireland was the worldwide model of successful adaptation to economic globalisation. The success story was phenomenal: a doubling of the workforce; a massive growth in exports; a GDP that was substantially above the EU average. Ireland became the world's largest exporter of software and manufactured the world's supply of Viagra. But there were two big problems....

In one of the most spellbinding accounts of men who go down to the sea in ships, the modern listener is given a seat in the whale boat of Owen Chase as he and his fellow crew and their captain make way in three boats after the wreckage of the Whaleship Essex. The account of how the Essex was wrecked inspired the infamous book Moby Dick and countless movies, including In the Heart of the Sea.

Renowned as FDR's favorite warship, the cruiser USS Houston was a prize target trapped in the far Pacific after Pearl Harbor. Without hope of reinforcement, her crew faced a superior Japanese force ruthlessly committed to total conquest. But the men of the Houston fought back with dignity, ingenuity, sabotage, willpower, and the undying faith that their country would prevail.

Women have bravely served in the US Navy for nearly a century, but they have been allowed to serve in combat roles for only the last 25 years. When the combat exclusion law was lifted in 1993, women in the navy soon had a new range of opportunities available to them. The repeal of the law finally gave women the chance to serve on combatant ships for the first time. Among the first women to step onto these warships as a new crewmember was Joanna Sprtel Walters.

In this original and meticulously researched narrative history, Gareth Russell utilises the sinking of the Titanic as a prism through which to look at the end of the Edwardian era and the seismic shift of modernity the 1910s have come to mark in the West. The Darksome Bounds of a Failing World focuses on the symbolism of the Titanic as the floating symbol of Anglo-American success, its clientele an apt illustration of the limitless - technological, financial - possibilities of its time.

You just tried out for the school play. Who wants the lead part more than anyone? YOU! Imagine sailing on the biggest, most beautiful ship in the world. Eating fine food. Wearing fancy clothes and partying with some very rich people. But be careful what you wish for. That might not be the way it was for a cabin attendant on Titanic…

Finding and identifying a pirate ship is the hardest thing to do under the sea. But two men—John Chatterton and John Mattera—are willing to risk everything to find the Golden Fleece, the ship of the infamous pirate Joseph Bannister. At large during the Golden Age of Piracy in the seventeenth century, Bannister should have been immortalized in the lore of the sea—his exploits more notorious than Blackbeard’s, more daring than Kidd’s. But his story, and his ship, have been lost to time.